Government MP Mark Pettingill claimed yesterday that David Burt should “probably” resign as chairman of the Public Accounts Committee or at least remove himself from any hearings about the latest Auditor-General’s report.

Mr Pettingill said Mr Burt’s role as junior finance minister during part of the financial year 2011 and all of 2012 — when official financial rules were repeatedly violated or ignored by civil servants — meant a conflict of interest existed.

But Mr Burt dismissed that last night, insisting: “There is no conflict of interest.” The shadow finance minister told The Royal Gazette: “I have a role as the current chairman of the PAC and I will continue to discharge my duties.”

Auditor-General Heather Jacobs Matthews said her report on government spending for the financial years 2010, 2011 and 2012 spoke to a “litany of non-compliance with financial instructions and related rules”.

Those failures throughout government, including in the Ministry of Finance, involved millions of dollars of taxpayers’ cash.

She said the senior civil servants guilty of non-compliance should be fined or otherwise disciplined but questioned whether there was a will in government to mete out such punishments.

The issue of failing to comply with financial instructions came up last week, separately, at a PAC meeting about the airport redevelopment project. Accountant-General Curtis Stovell told the meeting he wasn’t asked for approval to waive financial rules, but finance minister Bob Richards later produced a 2014 memo in which Mr Stovell did give permission.

Mr Burt said after the meeting he was “shocked that the Accountant-General came here today and said that the OBA Government is violating financial instructions in their approach to the airport”, later adding that the memo covered only the first stage of the project.

Mr Pettingill chided him in Parliament on Friday for failing to speak out about the Auditor-General’s findings of non-compliance with financial instructions when the Progressive Labour Party was in power.

But the Speaker of the House Randy Horton said Mr Burt couldn’t comment on a report that had been referred to the PAC by the Speaker.

Yesterday, Mr Pettingill said: “He has commented on the airport at length. Why is it that he can comment constantly on the airport in public yet can’t comment on serious allegations that relate to his party and his former government?

“It sounds to me like having your cake and eating it too. He applies the rules when they suit his benefit.” Asked if Mr Burt should recuse himself from PAC hearings relating to the Auditor’s report, Mr Pettingill replied: “It’s an interesting question, isn’t it? He was in a position of intimate knowledge.

“You can’t say ‘oh, he wasn’t in charge’. You have intimate knowledge as junior minister or you should have involvement of what’s happening in that Ministry. It’s very fair to ask the question: if these things occurred when you were junior finance minister how can you be a watchdog? If it was the same position in the OBA, he’d be screaming blue murder.”

Mr Pettingill added: “He should recuse himself from dealing with anything that’s being raised in relation to the period of time under his tenure as junior finance minister. As there’s so much, he should probably resign from the committee.”

Mr Burt said since he became PAC chairman in early 2013 the committee had conducted all of its business unanimously.

“The public should be reminded that there are more OBA members on the PAC than PLP members,” he said. “Additionally, we have issued reports on previous Auditor-General’s reports that covered the time when the PLP was in power, and there has been no complaint as to our work.”

He repeated that it wasn’t “proper” for him to report on the Auditor’s report, adding: “By contrast, the oversight of current spending — the airport — is not something that has been referred to the committee by the Speaker of the House.

“This is something that the PAC has decided to hold hearings on.”

Responding to Mr Pettingill’s claim in Parliament of PLP hypocrisy, Mr Burt said: “Regarding the spurious charge of hypocrisy, what we need in Bermuda is better governance.

“I have a role as the current chairman of the PAC and I will continue to discharge my duties. It should also be reminded that I didn’t accuse the OBA government of violating financial instructions; that was done by the Accountant-General in testimony before the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament.”

He said Mr Richards should comment on why during almost three years in power he hadn’t tabled the government’s financial instructions in the House to make violating them a crime.

And he said he was keen to hear what the Premier had to say about Mr Stovell’s PAC testimony. Mr Burt became junior finance minister in November 2010 and stayed in the role until the OBA came to power in December 2012.

Mrs Matthews’s report reveals that during the financial year that ran from April 2010 to March 2011, there were departmental expenditures in the Ministry of Finance not approved by Cabinet in the sum of $2.4m, as well as $300,000 worth of expenditure without signed contracts and $4 million worth of contracts not tendered.